


Sleepless

by FortySevens



Series: Sleepless 'verse [1]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Bedsharing, Cassian can't either, F/M, Fix-It, Hurt/Comfort, I wrote this instead of NaNo-ing, Jyn can't sleep, Poor babies with PTSD, hiding out in Medical while the Rebellion rebels around them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-16
Updated: 2017-11-16
Packaged: 2019-02-03 08:19:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12744546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FortySevens/pseuds/FortySevens
Summary: ...so she can’t do much more than nod, but not enough to break eye contact, because—She doesn’t want to look away.For a moment, they’re back in the elevator on Scarif, bleeding and eyes locked and dying and alone and perfect.





	Sleepless

**Author's Note:**

> In the continuing adventures of I Should Be Working On [ Just Fake It (And No One Will Know You’re In Over Your Head)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3400679) or my 2017 NaNoWriMo project, here is...not either of those things, but a story that I couldn't get out of my head, and probably the first in a series of interconnected one-shots that exist in a post-Rogue One world where everybody lives, tries to figure out what the hell to do with their lives, and can't sleep.
> 
> Prompt of the fic from [The Fake Redhead.com](https://thefakeredhead.com/tfrs-prompt-library/)
> 
> Number 132 “I would like to join you in acknowledging the difficulties of your life.” 
> 
> “You are the worst at this comfort thing.”

Somehow, the members of Rogue One survive.

 

Jyn’s not sure how it happened, is even less sure if she can chalk it up to the Force, not with the love-hate-indifference-disbelief she has in it—depending on the hour, the minute, the second, the world and how many people on it are trying to kill her—but somehow, they make it off Scarif in more or less one piece.

 

And Jyn doesn’t know how she’s supposed to handle that, let alone what she’s supposed to do next.

 

Time has never meant much to her. In her life before she was dragged by the neck into this mess by an eight-foot-tall murder bot, life was about taking time by the second with the heady understanding that death was hovering around every corner, and it was up to her to decide if she was going to survive each brush with it, until such time when she decided she doesn’t want to anymore and lets it all go.

 

That was supposed to be Scarif.

 

After hearing K2SO lose his original body, after watching Cassian fall, after facing down her mother’s killer, she was ready to let it all go on Scarif.

 

She was ready, Cassian was ready, Baze and Chirrut were ready, Bodhi was scared but willing to do what was right, and K2SO definitely knew the odds, and yet—

 

They made it back.

 

Jyn heaves a sigh and tries to roll over on the narrow cot in the tiny Medical Bay room she was assigned when she regained full consciousness some days before, but all that accomplishes is to press her nose into the long-gone-flat pillow under her head, which in turn pushes the scent of bacta up her nose, and all _that_ serves is to remind her of the remnants of the slimy substance, which clings to her skin even days after the quick and dirty knee reconstruction surgery necessitated a dip in a tank.

 

Taking a dip in bacta is high on _no one’s_ to do list.

 

And it wasn’t until she was removed from the tank, her healthy skin pink, the rest of it still somewhat bruised and a little achy, that Jyn realizes just how much she missed while taking that sedated swim, pumped with as many meds as the Rebellion was willing to spare to a half-feral Partisan with previously-debatable motives.

 

To the Rebellion’s credit, it was a hell of a lot more than she ever got while she ran with Saw.

 

But that’s something to think of later, perhaps when all the suns in the galaxy decide to die out in unison.

 

Jyn flops onto her back and stares at the ceiling, traces the cracks in the walls of the room buried deep within the Rebellion’s stronghold. She tries every trick she knows to convince her body that sleep is necessary to make the throbbing in her knee go away, but eventually, she has to give up the ghost, because there really is no way in hell she’s getting to sleep tonight.

 

Because, brush with death or not, Jyn can’t sleep, because the Rebel base is on Yavin IV and Yavin IV is a jungle, and that means it’s _sticky_.

 

Where Wobani was a thrice-damned cold that seeped into her bones, and Jedha was a dry, icy wind that left her gritty with coarse sand, and Eadu was _wet_ and she was _not_ going to think about what else that miserable excuse for an Imperial Research station was— _Force Jyn, that’s_ enough—and Scarif was hot and bright in so many ways that Jyn was _also_ not going to think about and—

 

_Damn it, stop!_

 

So, even though Yavin IV is safe in ways Jyn doesn’t remember feeling in a long time, especially not since— _no, you’re not going there either, give yourself a karking break_ —she still can’t sleep, because the scrubs issued to her after her dunk in bacta stick to her skin like they’re glued to it, and there’s a broken spring in her mattress because it was stolen, as most things in the Rebellion are, so—

 

Savoir of the Rebellion, and she just can’t win.

 

Jyn closes her eyes and digs her fingers into her temples as she sits up, carefully swings her legs over the side of the cot. Courtesy of one of the sentient medical attendants, there are a pair of slippers neatly lined up next to her bed, and she sets the foot of her good leg in the first before she carefully tests her weight on the one with the shiny new kneecap.

 

To her body’s usually dubious credit, she doesn’t fall flat on her face.

 

Yet.

 

As she shuffles out of her tiny room, she can tell herself all she wants that her wandering is aimless, she could run into anyone—like Bodhi, who’s waiting for a replacement hand, or Baze, who’s sitting in the tank room and waiting for Chirrut and the wounds in his stomach and abdomen to heal—but her feet pretty much immediately take her deeper into Medical. The halls are blessedly deserted in the late hour, doctors huddled in makeshift offices or sacking out in the Med Staff racks, so no one questions Jyn as she heads to the sub-critical patient rooms, where a helpful med-droid informed her earlier that day that her partner had been moved to.

 

The lights in the hall are low and the ones in his room are off, but Jyn easily sees Cassian’s form stretched out on the bed, the head of it tilted slightly in deference to the spinal implants that must be finally settled enough that he doesn’t have to be laid out flat like he had been the other day, when a sentient doctor’s assistant snuck her into his room for a far-to-short visit, one in which he wasn’t even conscious enough to register her presence through more than a twitch of his fingers before he was taken for his own bacta dunk.

 

“You should be sleeping.”

 

Jyn startles, but only just, and narrows her eyes through the shadows in his room to find Cassian awake and watching her, because of course he is, “I’ll sleep when I’m-”

 

It’s _much_ too soon to joke about dying, but that doesn’t stop the first half of the phrase from flying off her tongue. Fortunately, she stops herself in time, clamps her mouth shut and shrugs as she leans against the doorframe, pointedly ignoring the unimpressed look on his face as she instead busies herself with wrapping her arms tight across her chest, “How are you holding up?”

 

“I can feel both legs again, so-” Cassian breaks off with a sigh and looks back up at the ceiling, which is as dry and cracked as the one in her room. “I don’t know.”

 

They stay like that for a bit, Jyn standing and not talking and Cassian mostly lying down and not talking, because that’s better than trying to unpack everything that happened on Scarif—or _before_ Scarif, and Jyn is still _not_ about to go there.

 

Cassian ends up being the one to break first, and he takes a minute to fight upright until he’s fully seated. When he gets there—she thinks for a second about helping, but doesn’t, because she also knows how much he needs to be able to do it himself—he asks, “Why can’t you sleep?”

 

Jyn shrugs, and immediately regrets the motion, because it pulls at her bad shoulder and the bruised ribs she keeps forgetting she has.

 

But Cassian’s still as sharp as ever, and he gives her this _look_ that strikes through her.

 

She waves a hand and walks deeper into the room, leans her hips against the curved metal bars at the foot of his bed—nicer than hers, as befitting both a Captain of Rebel Intelligence, and a man who got shot, fell two meters, and had to be dragged through the sand to an escape vehicle that appeared like a thrice-damned miracle that swept them away from the Death Star’s blast.

 

“I don’t know,” is what she finally settles on, because she doesn’t. “Too much to think about. A lot of stuff I as doing a good job at forgetting before you came around,” she adds in a poor attempt to be funny.

 

He doesn’t completely take the bait.

 

“I’m not going to apologize for breaking you out of Wobani.”

 

“You weren’t even there,” she snorts.

 

“Wasn’t I?”

 

Just because she was out of it after K2SO nearly strangled her—and _how_ are they going to find a replacement droid to install his backup tapes, because it’s not like the Empire is going to just _hand one over_ if they ask really nicely for a body to house the mind of what’s probably Cassian’s best friend—Jyn narrows her eyes, “I would have known if you were there.”

 

“Sure, you would. Of course.”

 

He sounds like he’s agreeing with her delusion—which it is _not_ , thanks very much, because she could never _afford_ to be deluded in a place like Wobani—and the way he looks at her kind of makes Jyn want to punch him in the face, because it serves as a reminder of how she felt when she looked at him after Eadu, even though she knows she doesn’t feel that way anymore and doesn’t want to think about or feel guilty about their stupid screaming match.

 

She doesn’t want to feel guilty at all.

 

None of this was _her_ fault.

 

“Jyn?”

 

Cassian’s voice brings her out of her stupid, mindless ramblings that she wishes she had more control over. She shakes her head, swipes a hand over her permanently disheveled bangs, “I’m fine.”

 

The look he favors her with clearly tells her he knows she’s _not_ fine, but it’s reflected in his eyes too, so it’s not like she doesn’t know that he’s just as _not fine_ as she is right now, “I mean,” Jyn loses her words, never really had them in the first place, so she just shrugs, winces again when her ribs twinge at her.

 

That pointed look turns into a frown, “You shouldn’t be on your feet.”

 

“I shouldn’t do a lot of things,” Jyn says, even as she watches Cassian scoot over on his narrow-but-larger-than-hers bed until his side is pressed up against the wall. “What are you doing?”

 

“Making room,” he sounds like it’s the most obvious thing in the galaxy, like he’s not a spy who lies for a living. “Sit.”

 

“Cassian, I-”

 

“Just sit, Jyn.”

 

Her legs _do_ hurt, most of her body still one giant mass of pain even if it’s not showing on her skin through bruises or broken bones or splits in her flesh, “Okay,” she sighs.

 

The first step she takes around he bed is echoed by the sound of her ankle popping, and she rolls her eyes at the brow Cassian arches in her direction. She carefully sits down on the spare strip of mattress by his side—it’s the side she knows the man in white shot him in, so she makes sure to leave a little bit of space so he can have room to breathe, and also because she isn’t quite ready to acknowledge the mark the doctor told her is going to stay on his skin for the rest of his life, especially not when Cassian was the one who stopped the man in white from taking her life at the top of the Citadel Tower.

 

_Too much Jyn. Way too much_.

 

She sighs as she settles in, because there’s the distinct possibility that she’s not going anywhere for a while, now that she’s stopped moving.

 

“You’re not wearing your necklace?”

 

Jyn looks down at her hands as they rest on her lap, and the leather cord that’s attached to her mother’s kyber crystal is wrapped tight around her fingers, the crystal itself digging into the bruised flesh of her palm. She pointedly does _not_ think about the minor panic attack she suffered when she woke up in the bacta tank and discovered she was completely—as in _completely_ , completely—naked and the necklace not where it should be.

 

The last time someone tried to remove her kyber crystal, they’d lost their hand.

 

Yet another reason why losing consciousness absolutely kriffiing terrifies her.

 

She shrugs, and then winces, because that _is_ a big part of why she’s still holding it in a death grip, “My ribs,” she says as she runs a thumb over the strands where they curve around her index finger. “I can’t lift my arms to tie it back together.”

 

It’s difficult for her to admit that, especially after so many years living with Saw, where admitting failure meant death, and she remembers so many Partisans they lost— _left behind_ —because they couldn’t keep up.

 

And she was one of them.

 

_No Jyn. Don’t karking go there._

 

“Do you want some help?”

 

Jyn blinks down at the strip of sheet between her thigh and his side, doesn’t quite know how to answer Cassian’s question.

 

It’s been _years_ , more than a decade even, since someone asked if she needed _help_. Since anyone in her life offered her something like that so freely.

 

“Uh, yes,” she manages. “Thanks.”

 

She flicks her thumb and unwraps the cord, splays her fingers as wide as they’ll go and marvels at the way it made deep red grooves that blend in perfectly with her still-bruised skin, the marks from when she slammed her hands onto the grate while trying not to fall off the tower still there, but faded.

 

Careful not to touch the crystal itself, Cassian slides his hand over hers and takes the necklace by one end of the leather cord, and it’s difficult not to twitch when Cassian brushes her hair to one side with a callused hand. Jyn dares not breathe when the crystal thumps into its familiar spot on her chest, and the backs of Cassian’s nails brush against her neck and catch against the fine hairs there as he ties the leather pieces together.

 

His hand traces a line down her spine when he’s done, stops at the small of her back and doesn’t pull away, and Jyn lets out a shuddering breath. She touches her fingers—the tips tingle now that her blood can flow back into them—to the familiar shape of the crystal and lets out a quick thanks to whatever entity, maybe the Force, for letting her keep it through what should have been a suicide mission.

 

They _should_ have died out there, on that beach.

 

“That’s kyber, isn’t it?”

 

Jyn turns her head to answer him, eyes going wide when she realizes just how close Cassian’s face is to hers. It’s easy to see the scar that’s healing by his ear on the side that hit the grate when he— _stop it Jyn, stop thinking about that kriffing tower_ —the way the stubble on his cheeks have grown out into a full beard, and his eyes, which are dark and intent on hers in a way she’s _really_ not used to.

 

The words, _it was my mother’s, she gave it to me before she was murdered by the man in white, the man you shot to save my life_ , catch in her throat, so she can’t do much more than nod, but not enough to break eye contact, because—

 

She doesn’t want to look away.

 

For a moment, they’re back in the elevator on Scarif, bleeding and eyes locked and dying and alone and perfect.

 

But reality sets back in, in the form of a med droid that beeps sharply as it passes Cassian’s room on its rounds.

 

They both flinch at the sound, hands flying to the places where their holsters would be if they were allowed to be armed while in Doctor Kalonia’s domain. Through her distraction, Jyn barely reacts when she realizes her hand brushed against Cassian’s side, close enough to feel the edges of the bacta patch they left overnight on his blaster wound, hiding where he—

 

_Damn it_.

 

A hoarse laugh cracks out of Jyn’s throat, and she can’t stop it no matter how hard she tries, just tilts her head to the side and buries her face into Cassian’s collarbone, where she feels the quiet rumblings of laughter vibrating through his skin too.

 

It’s not until the laugher fades that Jyn feels the hand on her lower back twitch, like Cassian forgot he left it there, and she thinks about pulling away for a second before Cassian uses the careful grip to pull her closer, so her side rests flush against his and her head shifts so her nose is buried against his neck, “We should try to get some sleep,” he finally says, and she hears the exhaustion in his tone.

 

“I can’t really move right now.”

 

With her forehead pressed against his neck, she feels him swallow, feels him hesitate before he says, “I didn’t say you had to.”

 

There’s probably something to be said about putting so much trust in someone so soon after meeting them, but in the short time she’s been with the Rebellion—with _Cassian_ —she’s seen him, seen what he’s capable of, and what length he’s willing to go for something he believes in. Knowing that and nearly dying together in the burning haze of her father’s work takes away some of the—

 

Some of the excuses.

 

There are so many _more_ things that matter than whether or not Jyn passes the night with someone she barely knows.

 

But she also knows enough.

 

She knows that.

 

It doesn’t mean she can bring herself to look him in the eye though, “Okay,” she says, shifting a little so she can grab her thigh and heft her reconstructed knee onto the bed. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to sleep.”

 

Cassian shifts against her, and she feels the way he presses his nose into her hair and takes a breath of—well, it has to be relief, because she can’t imagine that the bacta residue in her hair smells all that pleasant.

 

“I can’t remember the last time I slept well,” he says, tone heavy with all the things he isn’t saying and probably never will. “At least we won’t be alone.”

 

That’s a heady prospect too, and Jyn swallows at the lump that’s forming in her throat as she pushes away the memories of the first bunker on Lah’mu, the second bunker eight years later, of her cell on Wobani, of—

 

_Damn it Jyn, enough!_

 

She sighs hard enough that her shoulder shifts with it, and Cassian grunts, not very loudly, but pressed up against him like she is, she feels every movement and hears every sound he makes, “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says as she pulls back, because he’s hurt enough because of her.

 

But before she can get very far, the hand on her back turns into an arm around her waist, and Cassian carefully pulls her back against his side, “It’s just my ribs, I’ll manage.”

 

“You shouldn’t have to just _manage_ ,” she says, because she can’t stop talking even though she _should_ , because she wants this, she _knows_ she wants this, so why the karking hell should she try to convince Cassian that he should send her back to her room?

 

His fingers carefully dig into her side, “I don’t want you to go.”

 

Jyn finally lifts her head, eyes wide as she catches his gaze. She sees a steady certainty that, like everything else she’s seen in him, she’s seeing for the first time. He shrugs the shoulder on his good side at the question in her eyes, “I’m not going to lie to you again,” he says, and then winces as he amends. “Not if I don’t have to.”

 

Right.

 

Because in the Rebellion that’s lurking outside this small, out of the way room deep in the ziggurat, Captain Cassian Andor is one of the intelligence operation’s best spies, best _liars_ , and he built up enough of a reputation in his career to be sent after something as high profile as word of what her father was doing on the Empire’s behalf.

 

It hurts to sigh as deep as she wants, but Jyn does it anyway and nods once, drops her head back to his shoulder and closes her eyes—because yeah, she’s not going to sleep, but she _is so tired_.

 

“I don’t know what to do next.”

 

Cassian goes still and quiet against her, and for long enough that she thinks he’s not going to say anything, until she feels him swallow hard before he settles on saying, “I’m sure Senator Mothma’s offer still stands.”

 

In her chest, her heart goes still.

 

“I didn’t mean it that way,” she says and lifts her head back up to look at him, to make it clear that she’s been honest, because she knows he’ll appreciate the sentiment right now as much as she does. “I just don’t know where I’d fit in around _here_.”

 

“You want to stay?”

 

Yes.

 

She wants to stay with _him_.

 

That’s another heady thought that she knows she’s not ready to say out loud, not when they really _have_ only known each other for mere days.

 

But she knows enough that she knows she _wants_ to stay with the Rebellion, and not just to fight for its cause, but to stay long enough to discover if getting to know Cassian better means wanting to stay with _him_ for as long as the war will allow her to.

 

It’s not something she’s ever wanted for herself at any point in the long and short of her life, but it feels like the right path to take.

 

This is where she’s supposed to be.

 

For now, she needs to figure out if she means _being here_ , as in on Yavin IV with the cause, or if she means _being here_ , as in here in this bed with Cassian’s arm wrapped tight around her waist.

 

Or if it’s both.

 

“Yes Cassian,” she shifts, presses her palm against the bandage covering his side as she settles in to pretend to sleep until she passes out or the sun rises, whichever comes first. “I want to stay.”

**Author's Note:**

> More to come in this 'verse. Next time, Jyn and Cassian see a post-ANH Leia Organa and it...goes.
> 
> Prompt of the fic from [The Fake Redhead.com](https://thefakeredhead.com/tfrs-prompt-library/)
> 
> Number 132 “I would like to join you in acknowledging the difficulties of your life.” 
> 
> “You are the worst at this comfort thing.”


End file.
